The deployment of DNSSEC in the .FR (France) ccTLD by AFNIC commenced on 14 September. The next steps will see deployment of DNSSEC pursued by DNS servers, administrators, registrars and ISPs.
DNSSEC is a protocol designed to help secure the DNS against attacks by cache poisoning. The purpose of such attacks is to capture and divert requests without users realising it, the risk being that users may disclose personal data in the belief that they are on the legitimate site.
In the next few days, the public key associated with the .FR TLD will be published in the root servers. As of next week, AFNIC will start consultations with the registrars, in order to set up the system enabling them to publish the signature information for domain names under .FR, such as afnic.fr.
The work of AFNIC will then continue with the set-up of training and assistance services for registrars and DNS server administrators wishing in turn to deploy DNSSEC. For their benefit, AFNIC is also publishing a comprehensive issue paper devoted to DNSSEC issues and operation, with the questions to ask in order to prepare its deployment.
Finally, from September 20th, onwards, AFNIC will be releasing version 3 of “ZoneCheck”, its DNS configuration test tool, a free software tool that integrates DNSSEC configuration tests, and is available on www.zonecheck.fr.
For more information in French and English on the deployment of DNSSEC in the .FR ccTLD, see the AFNIC website at www.afnic.fr.
To register your .FR domain name, check out Europe Registry here.